Use Google Translate to Increase the Appeal of Your eCommerce Website

By Adam | 1 Jul 2015 11:00:00

If you're running an eCommerce website, the one thing you want is for it to be easy for people to use. The customer's convenience must always come first, because if they have any trouble with your site they aren't very likely to make a purchase. You may make the effort to have an easy to understand layout, simple payment gateways and customer support which is always available, but there's one thing that a lot of people overlook. If you've got a website, it's up for the whole world to see and therefore if your site is only in English you are narrowing your consumer base significantly.

Of course, it's silly to expect everyone to become fluent in various languages because it is just not practical. It would be good if you were able to master another language, but when you've got a business to run it's pretty understandable that you'd not have time for that. This is where Google Translate comes in. You may be familiar with Google Translate as a tool which you can use to input words or sentences to have them translated from one language to another. It's quite intelligent and is even able to identify a language as soon as you paste something. What you perhaps didn't know, however, was that Google Translate also provides a way for you to have your website translated into whatever language is most appropriate when non-English speaking people come across it.

This is quite easily done too, and completely free! You just need to go to theGoogle Translate Toolspage and fill out a few details about your website. After this you'll be given the HTML code for the Google Translate widget which just needs to be added into the coding of your site; you can literally just copy and paste it! It's very simple. Once it's there, customers will be able to see your website in their native language, which is a huge advantage! If your business is one of only a few to offer a certain product or service, then if the rival sites don't have the Google Translate widget, it's pretty clear who they're going to come to! Alternatively, look at it like this; your rivals might already have the widget, and you don't! Foreign customers won't be going for you...

So you may as well spend a few minutes to get the widget set up! Hopefully it will bring you an increase in sales, but even if you don’t notice something right away, you can be sure that this is a good idea in the long run.